More than a year’s gone by since I last updated the blog, and that bears some explanation. No better way to do it, and try to get back into the groove, than with an installment of Friday Five Things.

#1 – Nothing To Say

Broadly speaking, bloggers can be divided into two categories: linkers and thinkers. Linkers function for the most part as aggregators, whereas thinkers for the most part produce original content.

Now, obviously, there’s plenty of overlap. Linkers don’t exclusively aggregate other people’s content, and thinkers invariably provide plenty of links to other sites. But I, personally, try to be more of a thinker than a linker. There is no shortage of people aggregating hobby content out there, and reproducing their effort seems to me an uninteresting waste of time: I’d rather talk about my hobby work, and offer my opinions, than just link to someone else’s.

This, however, becomes a paddle-free scato-riparian expedition of the first order when you can’t think of anything interesting to write about. Now, it’s not strictly true that I’ve had absolutely nothing to say for the last thirteen months – I’ve had a couple of drafts mouldering for a while, now, plus a few ideas for other posts moving forward – but I haven’t really pushed myself to post because of…

#2 – Ennui

I’m not sure people who don’t blog truly appreciate how hard it can be. Unless you have a knack for it, blogging is work. It takes real effort to organize and produce a post of non-trivial length, especially one that you’re supplementing with any kind of multimedia. Setting aside the time and mental energy to keep up with things has to become habitual, because there are too many other less-taxing distractions that you can easily fill your days with. And then, once you’ve lost the rhythm, it’s that much harder to find it again, because, “Damn, it’s already been this long; nobody’s going to notice or care if I go a little longer.”

Suffice it to say that less-taxing distractions have had me by the face for the last while. However, I plead innocent to charges of pure laziness. Sure, there’s been some of that, but – as the next three points should explain – I’ve experienced some disillusionment with the hobby that I’m just lately overcoming.

#3 – GW

Unlike many hobbyists, I do not regard Games Workshop as a vaguely-malevolent money-grubbing Other™. However, I was bitterly disappointed last year when, following their release of their new line of paints and the 6e 40k rules, they focused on producing painting guides for this month’s New Shiny Thing (be it Hobbit miniatures, Chaos Space Marines, Dark Angels, Tau, or what have you) and declined to deliver much in the way of support for, say, my Blood Angels.

Yes, this is selfish of me, given that the Blood Angels enjoyed a thorough pimping-out in early 2012, and lots of other armies have been waiting a lot longer for some love from the publisher. And, yes, if I ply through GW’s various published materials I can probably pull together enough bits and pieces of information to get a notion of the Heavy Metal “look” for the Blood Angels. But since last summer GW’s produced electronic painting guides for (in addition to the month’s New Shiny Thing) both the Ultramarines and Evil Sunz Orks. They’ve even produced this A Call To War book providing painting advice for one of the Blood Angels’ successor chapters, the Flesh Tearers. It’d be nice if they could see their way clear to producing the same sorts of guides for other armies that won’t see a new codex anytime soon, and their failure to do so has left me less motivated to make progress on my army.

#4 – Moving

My wife and I moved into a new rental home in mid-March, which was an enormous disruption in our lives from which we’ve finally – finally – gotten settled. Painting miniatures and blogging have been pretty far down the priority list for the last three months, not to mention impossible while all of my hobby-related gear was in boxes.

#5 – Workspace

My workspace at my old apartment was a converted computer armoire. While this was pretty fantastic from an organizational perspective, it was fairly lacking as an actual place to work because I couldn’t put my elbows up on it while painting like I could with a desk. Unfortunately getting anything larger was out of the question because of space constraints in the apartment, and frankly having an suboptimal workspace contributed to my lack of motivation to, you know, work.

One of the reasons my wife and I moved was to get more space, and I now have an actual desk as my workspace (the particulars of the new space will be the subject of a forthcoming post). I haven’t quite fully equipped it yet, but I’m getting closer, and so I’m not going to have “crappy workspace” as a drag on my motivation for very much longer.

But for a coat of matte varnish I finished my Kabalite Warrior test model over the weekend, and I wanted to put up a few pictures – including some closeups – and write a bit about what I like and don’t like about how it turned out.

A while back I reviewed the Tabletop Gaming Bunker Acrylic Paint Shelf as an access and storage solution for Vallejo- and Reaper-style dropper bottles. While my review was mostly positive, I noted that the flat-horizontal orientation of the shelves created problems in terms of retention (droppers would fall out of the shelf given any good […]

One of my absolute favorite hobby blogs is Tale of Painters, which is a group blog run by six really talented guys – some of their work has been featured in the “Armies on Parade” section that used to run in White Dwarf magazine – and a cast of equally-talented guests. Currently the principals are […]